Japanese Tea Garden

The garden was created by George Turner Marsh as a Japanese Village feature of the 1894 Mid Winter Exposition and was designed and constructed by Makoto Hagiwara. Originally one acre in size, it was expanded to five acres in 1902, and Hagiwara designed the expanded garden; the Hagiwara family continued to live and work in the garden until 1942, when the family was interned during the Second World War. The Main Gate is dated 1894 and was reconstructed in 1985, as was the South Gate. The five-story pagoda was originally constructed for a Japanese village at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, the tea house was built for the Mid-Winter Exposition of 1894, and the dry landscape garden was designed in 1953 by Nagao Sakurai. Amazarasti-no-Hotoke, the bronze Buddha, was cast in 1790 in Tajima Province on Honshu for the Taioriji Temple and placed in the garden in 1945, the gift of the S. & G. Gump Company in memory of A. Livingston Gump. A plaque to the Hagiwara family by Ruth Asawa, bronze on rock, 1974, was a gift of the John McLaren Society for the Japanese Tea Garden.